This paper documents how firms exercise discretion in defining affiliates and reporting public float in response to SEC regulations. I find that firms with higher expected compliance costs under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 tend to classify more shares as affiliated and...

U.S. public companies can redact information from required material contracts disclosures whenmanagement asserts that the information is immaterial and would cause competitive harm ifpublicly disclosed (i.e., it is proprietary). This study examines whether managers use this channelto withhold...

While decades of research focuses on the effectiveness of public enforcement and managers' incentives for financial misreporting, little is known about how the SEC selects targets for investigation. Using a new database of formal SEC investigations, we triangulate the determinants of SEC...

The stated goal of the 2011 SEC Whistleblower (WB) Program introduced as part of the Dodd-Frank Act was to strengthen investor protection through greater deterrence of securities law violations and more effective regulatory enforcement. While the SEC has articulated the success of the program...

We investigate Regulation FD's (FD) effect on management earnings forecast properties. We posit FD's prohibition on private manager-analyst communication reduces (increases) optimism (pessimism) in management earnings forecasts. Prior to FD, managers could avoid publicly retracting prior...

The U.S. SEC adopted a rule in December 2007 to eliminate the 20-F reconciliation requirement for foreign private issuers preparing financial statements under IFRS as issued by the IASB. In this paper we examine whether eliminating the reconciliation is associated with information asymmetry for...

Using the staggered implementation of the EDGAR system from 1993 to 1996 as a shock to information dissemination technologies, we examine the potential benefits and costs of modern information technologies on the real economy. On the one hand, we document that broader information dissemination...

The 2016 Tick Size Pilot Program is an exogenous shock that incentivized fundamental investors to become more informed by acquiring fundamental firm information. Building on these studies, we examine the effect of the pilot program on earnings guidance. We find that the treatment firms...

We find evidence consistent with the notion that the broad non-exclusionary disclosure requirement of Reg-FD inhibits the adoption of new disclosure technologies. Our analyses exploit unanticipated SEC guidance (“Reg-SocMedia”) that outlined how social media channels could be used in...

We describe the process through which the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) makes filings “publicly available.” For a sample of Form 4 (insider trade) filings, we show that, during the period we examine, the majority of filings are available to paying subscribers of the SEC's public...